Steam Greenlight gets submission fee, smaller rating queue

Valve's indie game voting system Greenlight has received hundreds of submissions from developers since its launch on August 30, but users eager to vote for games they'd like to see added to Steam's catalog were also confronted, perhaps not too surprisingly, with fake and/or offensive entries from pranksters. As a result, Valve has updated its terms and now requires a $100 fee in order to submit a game to Greenlight (the fee is not retroactive, so anyone who submitted a game for consideration before the fee was implemented won't have to pay it). In another bid to reduce the "noise and clutter" from Greenlight, the queue window of unrated games has shrunk to just a dozen.

Valve also stated that it will donate the collected fees to Child's Play , a charity that brings toys, consoles, and games to children in hospitals around the world. "We have no interest in making money from this, but we do need to cut down noise in the system," UI Designer Alden Kroll said in a separate post.

Steam's community, though supportive of the update, carries just enough healthy divisiveness for discussion. "I guess I'd rather submit a game to Desura or sell it through the Humble Store before taking the risk of paying $100 so a group of trolls can downvote my game and it doesn't even make it on Steam," one comment states.

"This is a really good change," another poster says. "$100 seems a little high to me, but any developer completely serious about getting their games onto Steam should be able to pay it. Greenlight isn't the place for mods or freeware games anyway."